{"id":16692,"date":"2021-06-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16692"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:27","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:27","slug":"crooked-marquees-tribeca-festival-2021-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/crooked-marquees-tribeca-festival-2021-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Crooked Marquee’s Tribeca Festival 2021 Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Two specific events summed up (for this long-time attendee, at least) the conundrum at the heart of the 2021 Tribeca Festival. On Monday, June 14th, the festival hosted a 20th anniversary reunion for Wes Anderson\u2019s The Royal Tenenbaums<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, exactly the kind of screening-and-Q&A that has been their bread and butter for years. It\u2019s an event that would have filled the SVA Theater on a typical Tribeca Monday, but since we\u2019re (slowly) coming out of a global pandemic, the director, four cast members, and moderator instead appeared via Zoom \u2013 and it was exactly the kind of messy, overlapping, occasionally indecipherable Zoom hang-out we\u2019ve all been having at home for the past 15 months. And the seats facing that screen were, at best, half full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No such attendance trouble plagued the premiere, two nights later, of the documentary short film Blondie: Vivir En La Habana<\/em><\/strong>. The draw wasn\u2019t the movie, an 18-minute mini-chronicle of the band\u2019s 2019 trip to Havana, Cuba that felt more like a DVD bonus feature than a festival film; the draw was the live appearance by the band afterward, playing an engaged and energetic mini-set of six or so songs. Tribeca has been pairing middling documentaries and live music for years now, and they always move tickets; this one would\u2019ve likely filled the Beacon Theatre in a \u201cnormal\u201d year. But fans were reportedly turned away from the event, because the social distancing and the limited space of the outdoor venue put a low cap on attendees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is the sticky wicket for Tribeca, a festival that I adore and will also acknowledge is less about films (as evidenced by this year\u2019s shortening of its name, deleting \u201cFilm\u201d from the branding altogether) than it is about stargazing. The carefully assembled anniversary events, the movie and music match-ups, the premieres that seem selected less for the quality of the filmmaking then who\u2019ll show up on the red carpet \u2013 it\u2019s always been a festival that promised, if nothing else, a parade of famous faces. With that promise dampened by decreasing but nevertheless persistent public safety requirements, the festival had to lean harder on the quality of the movies than ever before.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And many of them were quite good. Adam Leon doesn\u2019t get enough credit as one of the few filmmakers keeping ground-level NYC filmmaking alive; I\u2019d put him in the same class as the Safdies, and note that he just needs his Uncut Gems<\/em>. Italian Studies <\/em><\/strong>isn\u2019t quite that \u2013 it\u2019s the least successful of his films to date, not quite managing the little miracle of Gimme the Loot <\/em>and Tramps<\/em>, both of which managed to simultaneously work as shaggy hang-out tales and forward-moving narratives. But the latter is kind of impossible in this story, in which a young woman (Vanessa Kirby) experiences either a bout of amnesia or a psychotic break, and ends up floating through the city for a few hours and trying to figure things out. Leon keenly captures the feeling of getting lost in Manhattan \u2013 in both its streets and your thoughts \u2013 and he pulls its seemingly disparate threads together with skill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Queen of Glory <\/em><\/strong>is also set in the city \u2013 but deep in the heart of the Bronx, which may as well be another country. That\u2019s not just observation; it\u2019s part of the film\u2019s text. Nana Mensah, a find<\/em>, writes, directs, and stars as a doctoral student whose already sketchy life plans are thrown into disarray by the death of her mother, who owns a Christian book and knicknack store deep in the Boogie Down. There\u2019s not much doubt how the conflicts at the center of the story (her romantic future, her estrangement from her father, the fate of the story) are going to shake out, but that doesn\u2019t matter much \u2013 it\u2019s all keenly observed and sensitively executed enough to be involving anyway, and it comes to a head with a single, unbroken close-up that\u2019s indescribably powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Salvator Mundi<\/em> sold for $450 million in 2017 \u2013 the record-holder for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction, and by the time that sale is shown in Andreas Koefoed\u2019s documentary The Lost Leonardo<\/em><\/strong>, that price tag looks even more deranged than it sounds. The controversial painting may have been painted, in whole or in part, by Leonardo da Vinci, but at a certain point in its rediscovery and restoration, the extent of his involvement barely mattered; whether its partisans were forgers or fabulists, it was deemed priceless, dubbed \u201cthe male Mona Lisa,\u201d and that was that. However you land on its controversial origins, Koefoed presents a damning portrait of an art world defined less by verifiable proof than the complex relationships and politics within the curators, critics, academics, collectors, and hustlers of the art world, and the degree to which all of those parties alternately lean on, humor, and cannibalize each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The making of Kids<\/em>, Larry Clark\u2019s controversial (and profitable) 1995 docudrama about youth run amuck, is the subject of the documentary account The Kids<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 as well as its aftermath, and the untimely deaths of two of its featured players (Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce) in the years that followed. Clark does not come off well, nor does screenwriter (and, later filmmaker) Harmony Korine, particularly in the contrasts between their public statements about how the film was made and the stories told by their cast. And there is certainly a case to be made for exploitation; Clark and Korine (and the Weinstein brothers, who distributed the film) got paid, and these skateboarders and street kids, many of them homeless, did not. But there\u2019s also something dishonest about the documentary\u2019s filmmaking; it\u2019s only when the end credits roll that we discover that Hamilton Harris – the Kids <\/em>co-star who gets the most interview time, comes off as the most thoughtful, and most clearly articulates the film\u2019s themes \u2013 was in fact the co-writer and co-producer of The Kids<\/em>. Is that unethical? It\u2019s arguable. But when you\u2019re making a movie about ethical filmmaking behavior, you\u2019d better make sure your own work is clean as a whistle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy own thought processes are very hard to define,\u201d Stanley Kubrick states early in the documentary profile Kubrick by Kubrick<\/em><\/strong>, which perhaps makes him a less-than-ideal subject for a film with such a title. But despite his protests, he has considerable insights on storytelling and craft, which seem like second nature to him; he didn\u2019t give many interviews, but he spoke on several occasions to the French film journalist Michel Ciment, whose recordings of those conversations provide the film\u2019s spine. It\u2019s strangely jarring to her his voice, softened by his Bronx accent, but full of certainty and pointed intelligence; director Gregory Monro weaves in film clips and archival interviews with his collaborators, along with a clever B-roll scheme using iconic props, costume pieces, and other totems from the work. Most importantly, he jettisons conventional chronology, organizing the material instead by themes and connections, making this less a conventional bio-doc and more of a freewheeling conversation \u2013 and celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Not that there weren\u2019t conventional bio-docs a plenty at Tribeca.  Like A Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres<\/em><\/strong> is about as conventional as they came, a soup-to-nuts profile of the music journalist (and Almost Famous<\/a> <\/em>supporting character), told via archival footage, contemporary interviews, and testimonials from a handful of legends. But the thing that makes bio-docs such a safe bet at film fests is that, as long as you pick a topic of interest, it will at least deliver information and diversion. Fong-Torres is an engaging subject, and the film\u2019s flaws are forgivable when it offers up the considerable pleasure of just hanging out with him for a while, and listening to him talk about music and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1983, a documentary crew shadowed Hustler<\/em> publisher Larry Flynt during his stunt presidential campaign. That footage was never seen until the new documentary Larry Flynt for President<\/em><\/strong>, but it\u2019s no nostalgia item; the film details how Flynt mounted the campaign partially as a publicity stunt and partially as a genuinely angry reaction to the rise of the religious right and the Moral Majority (and President Reagan\u2019s embrace of those forces), sensing how the culture wars were useful for Republicans as a distraction from unpopular economic and foreign policy (still true!). It\u2019s a well-assembled piece of work, serving as a post-mortem of the odd campaign \u2013 ultimately derailed by his legal woes and unpredictability \u2013 as contemporary interviews with journalists and campaign strategists augment priceless archival footage of Flynt\u2019s campaign proclamations, which are vulgar, vile, and frequently dead-on accurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But my choice for the best non-fiction film of the festival is Dan Chen\u2019s Accepted<\/em><\/strong>, which is not only a riveting but cleverly structured doc. It begins telling the story its subjects wanted to tell: of T.M. Landry College Prep in rural Louisiana, boasting a 100% college acceptance rate (32% of them in Ivy League schools), all the more impressive because their student body is mostly comprised of underprivileged kids. We meet its unconventional educators, and see them pushing and encouraging students; we meet individual students, who share their touching and inspiring backstories; we follow them to their stressful ACT tests. And then, halfway in, a New York Times<\/em> expos\u00e9 turns the narrative on its head \u2013 and the movie too, as we revisit scenes staged for the camera, and find out what the interview subjects really <\/em>wanted to talk about. I suppose one shouldn\u2019t reward a film for what it doesn\u2019t do, but it\u2019s so easy to imagine the lazy, dumbed-down version of Accepted<\/em> (the one that puts the twist into a rat-tat-tat pre-title sequence) that I can\u2019t help but be thankful for the one we got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was not at Tribeca’s big Closing Night event, a proof-of-vaccination-required screening of Dave Chappelle’s new documentary at Radio City Music Hall, followed by an all-star hip-hop concert. But I hear it was a packed. Tribeca will be back to its old self soon enough. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year’s version of the 20-year-old New York media fest struggled to maintain its identity in a tricky, almost-post-pandemic atmosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":16693,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-16692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22262,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16692\/revisions\/22262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}